David Bowie's Lazarus review roundup: critics transfixed by wild ride

The off-Broadway world premiere of The Man Who Fell to Earth’s sequel – an ‘unapologetically weird’ ‘fever dream’ – left critics perplexed, yet impressed by lead Michael C Hall and director Ivo van Hove

Not many off-Broadway musicals sell out in minutes, but then not many of them feature new David Bowie songs, and combine the talents of playwright Enda Walsh, director Ivo van Hove and actor Michael C Hall. Lazarus, which opened at New York Theatre Workshop on Monday 7 December, is a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nic Roeg’s 1976 film (based on a Walter Tevis novel), in which Bowie played an alien seeking water for his planet. Hall takes the role of the starman in this world premiere, which was co-written by Bowie. Here’s what the critics made of it.

It will be many years before we see a jukebox musical as unapologetically weird as Lazarus, an almost incomprehensible and oddly intriguing new play […] At moments apposite or otherwise, the band strike up a Bowie song, familiar, obscure or brand new. There’s a synthpop version of The Man Who Sold the World, an anguished take on Changes, a prettily stripped down Heroes. These are inarguably marvellous songs, but few of them are integrated into the script, which can give the play the feeling of a downbeat and occasionally alarming karaoke party.

The extremely loose narrative jumps off from Tevis’ book and Roeg’s film in expanded directions. To the extent that the hallucinatory series of scenes can be boiled down (or that I understood them), the story centers on Thomas Jerome Newton (Hall), a humanoid alien who came to Earth from his drought-stricken planet many years earlier. After amassing a fortune in business while attempting to build a rocket ship to take him home, he was experimented on by the government and now lives in depressed isolation on a diet of gin, Twinkies and jarring bursts of blaring television, unable to leave or to die.

Ice-cold bolts of ecstasy shoot like novas through the glamorous muddle and murk of Lazarus, the great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie. These transfixing moments occur when Mr Bowie feels most palpably present – that is, when one of the show’s carefully stylized performers delivers a distinctly Bowie number in a distinctly Bowie style.

People splash through milk. Others pop dozens of balloons. Strange women sniff others’ lingerie (frequently). Impromptu kabuki actors invade the stage. And through it all, Newton – played by golden-throated Michael C Hall, who is best known for his roles on Dexter and Six Feet Under but whose theatrical credits include big roles in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cabaret and Chicago – mostly remains stoic, lonely, yearning. At its core, Lazarus is a two-hour meditation on grief and lost hope (with no intermission), but it takes so many wild, fantastical, eye-popping turns that it never drags.

Having now seen Lazarus and read the script and revisited The Man Who Fell to Earth, I can confidently report that David Bowie has landed on East Fourth Street with a work of blistering nihilism, no small sum of inscrutable foolishness and a fistful of the most brilliant contemporary rock you will hear anywhere. I can also say with some certainty that director Ivo van Hove – the Belgian-born director who seems to be falling to Earth’s theaters everywhere at once these days – has a rich imagination ideal for this wild ride.

If I got any of [the plot] wrong, complain to the creators, who don’t make Lazarus easy to follow. That the piece unfolds in dream logic, or as a fever dream, is fairly obvious in the first 10 minutes, so best to let it wash over you without worrying about sequence or connections. Such detachment is easy to achieve – even thrilling – when Milioti warbles Changes with such seething, repressed intensity, it’s like hearing that glorious anthem for the first time.

As the lead in David Bowie’s musical Lazarus, Michael C Hall felt the singer’s death like an ‘internal fist clench’. The former Dexter star talks about inhabiting the role Bowie first played in The Man Who Fell to Earth – and his own struggle with cancer